Principal Distributed Systems Engineer (Data Platform)

Location: Pleasanton, California, United States; Flex hybrid work with at least 50% of each quarter spent in the office or in the field with customers, prospects, and partners.

Annual base salary: $222,900–$334,300 USD for the primary location; additional US locations: $187,100–$334,300 USD.

Company

hirify.global is a Fortune 500 company and AI platform for managing people, money, and agents.

What you will do

• Own the technical vision, architecture, and implementation of a highly scalable lakehouse and data-product platform.
• Build platform capabilities across dbt Core, Airflow, Trino, Apache Iceberg, Amazon S3 Tables, AWS Glue Catalog, access control, and visualization.
• Define project structures, orchestration, CI/CD, environments, semantic and metrics definitions, reusable modeling patterns, and operational support.
• Drive performance and scale through Iceberg layout and maintenance, partitioning, incremental processing, compression, and Trino tuning.
• Design high-availability and disaster-recovery capabilities, including multi-AZ resilience, failover, backup and restore, monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, reruns, and backfills.
• Set technical direction across teams, mentor senior and staff engineers, document best practices, evaluate technologies, and act as the platform architect and escalation point.

Requirements

• 14+ years of experience in software development engineering.
• 6+ years designing, building, and operating complex distributed system architectures, including highly available and fault-tolerant systems such as those achieving 99.9% uptime.
• 8+ years using at least two programming languages such as Java, Python, or Go, including production-level distributed-systems code.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. A Master’s degree in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, or a related field is strongly preferred.
• Expert algorithmic thinking for efficient, scalable solutions serving high-volume data and interactive query workloads.
• Deep expertise in API development, advanced API protocols or architectural patterns, distributed systems principles, partitioning, consensus or coordination, fault tolerance, failure recovery, and high-availability strategies.
• Extensive production experience with large-scale data processing and lakehouse platforms, including Kafka, Spark, Flink, Airflow, Trino, Apache Iceberg, Amazon S3 or S3 Tables, and AWS Glue Data Catalog.
• Production dbt Core experience at scale, including large model graphs, testing, data-quality frameworks, incremental models, and reusable project architecture.
• Strong production SQL and data-modeling experience, including query and physical-layout optimization.
• Experience with Terraform or an equivalent tool for production cloud infrastructure.
• Experience designing multi-tenant access control, IAM, encryption, and governed analytical-data access.
• Experience with a visualization or semantic layer such as Apache Superset, Metabase, Looker, or comparable tools.
• Strong understanding of large-scale systems design, scalability, cost-aware architecture, and security for distributed data environments.
• Proven ability to collaborate across software teams, drive architectural direction, and communicate through technical writing, documentation, and presentations.
• Ability to work with high autonomy in a fast-moving and ambiguous environment.

Culture & Benefits

• Flex work combines in-person time and remote work, with at least half of each quarter spent in the office or field depending on the role.
• Full-time employment with access to hirify.global’s comprehensive benefits.
• Potential eligibility for the hirify.global Bonus Plan or role-specific commission or bonus.
• Potential annual refresh stock grants.
• Reasonable accommodations are available during the application process.
• Equal-opportunity employment supports individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.

Hiring process

• Recruiters provide additional compensation details during the hiring process.
• hirify.global maintains an employee referral process for referred candidates.